OT: web design

[Brian K. White]

Another reason why it's sensible to avoid putting uncessary junk in your web 
pages.

I have a perfectly up to date machine. Completely best-case scenario, most 
common case scenario.
Windows XP home, 3.2ghz p4 with HT, a gig of pc3200 ram, 800fsb, all the 
latest versions of all the common plugins (flash, acrobat, java, quicktime, 
etc...)
Everything works fine, no viruses, no broken plugins etc... so even the 
worst examples of careless inefficient web pages work fine for me at least 
on this machine.

So I'm doing some research / shopping, and I'm reading an article that I 
arrived at indirectly by at least a couple links.
The article has my attention and I want to read it. If I were to move off of 
the page I'm viewing I know I may not be able to find my way back.

There is a row of advertizements along the page. They are all topical and 
all of interest to me also.

Dumb thing #1 that people do who disregard common sense of simplicity in web 
design:
When you follow a link, something about the new page makes the back button 
unuseable. You just keep getting the new page over and over again due to 
some kind of immediate redirect or something.
It doesn't matter that you have no difficulty displaying the new page. The 
unecessary gizmo on it is still a problem when you can't get back to, say, 
the google search results you came from.

The answer there is, once you have been burned by this once, you start being 
paranoid and every time you want to follow a link but value the current page 
enough to worry about losing it, you right-click on the link and choose open 
in new window or in new tab (for those browsers that have tabs).

This brings us to Dumb thing #2:
Use of flash.
Remember, I have flash. It works fine. I don't even mind using it. I love 
those little (usually funny) movies people make. It's like a new art form 
and I think it's great because some people are really clever and creative 
with it.
So this article I was talking about above has this stack of ads I am 
interested in.
3/4 of the ads are flash animations, and the content could have been 
animated gif and look the same.

The flash ads can not be right-clicked on in order to open in new window.
When you right-click on them, you only get a menu from the flash player with 
a few options and help/about for the flash pugin instead of the right-click 
menu from the browser.
This means you have no way to safely open the link in a new window. All you 
can do is follow the link normally, and hope it's not one of those sites 
that traps you.
Great. Guess which sites I never went to?

Sure, I can get there without losing my current page through even more 
inconvenience than doing the right-click, which is already a step backwards 
from the bad old days when all you hed to do was click on things with one 
immediate step. I could cut & copy my current url, open a new browser, paste 
the url, then go back to the other window and click on the flash ad and have 
it all be a waste of time because only occasional pages actually "trap" you 
from going back.

Every "new" thing must have many such indirect problems. I certainly 
couldn't think of them all ahead of time, and clearly many web designers 
haven't either.
That's why it's better to default to not using them instead of defaulting to 
using them.

The point is just think simple in general as a philosophy and apply it 
without requiring proof before hand why you shouldn't use gizmofeature3000 
now with giga-smell.
Require instead proof that it causes no direct or indirect hassles anywhere.
It's pretty hard to prove a negative like that, so generally, you will not 
be using any such new things if you followed that way.
This is exactly as it should be!

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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